Star Destroyers
Page 1
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION by Tony Daniel and Christopher Ruocchio
SUPERWEAPON by David Drake
A SUDDEN STOP by Steve White
ANOTHER SOLUTION by Mark L. Van Name
THE MAGNOLIA INCIDENT by Mike Kupari
A HELPING HAND by Jody Lynn Nye
BOOMERS by J. R. Dunn
HATE IN THE DARKNESS by Michael Z. Williamson
THE STARS ARE SILENT by Gray Rinehart
EXCERPTS FROM TWO LIVES by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
ICEBREAKER by Dave Bara
TRY NOT TO KILL US ALL by Joelle Presby
SKIPJACK by Susan R. Matthews
HOMECOMING by Robert Buettner
NOT MADE FOR US by Christopher Ruocchio
A TALE OF THE GREAT TREK WAR ABOARD THE STARSHIP PERSISTENCE by Brendan DuBois
STAR
DESTROYERS
Big Ships. Blowing Things Up.
Star Destroyers
Edited by Christopher Ruocchio and Tony Daniel
BIG SHIPS. BLOWING THINGS UP.
GO BIG OR GO HOME!
Boomers. Ships of the Line. Star Destroyers. The bigger the ship, the better the bang. From the dawn of history onward, commanding the most powerful ship around has been a dream of admirals, sultans, emperors, kings, generalissimos, and sea captains everywhere. For what the intimidation factor alone doesn’t achieve, a massive barrage from super-weapons probably will.
Thus it was, and ever shall be, even into the distant future. From the oceans of Earth, to beneath the ice of Europa, to the distant reaches of galactic empires, it is the great warships and their crews that sometimes keep civilization safe for the rest of us—but sometimes become an extinction-level event in and of themselves.
In “Superweapon” by David Drake, a fight for possession of an ancient alien warship will determine the fate of two vast interstellar powers. Then in “Hate in the Darkness” by Michael Z. Williamson, a team of libertarian Freeholders must think outside the box to do battle with the might of the United Nations and its powerful navy. And in “A Helping Hand,” Jody Lynn Nye posits an interstellar submarine on a rescue mission behind enemy lines—with the fate of an entire species hanging in the balance.
Big, bold, and edge-of-your-seat space opera and military science fiction from David Drake, Sharon Lee & Steve Miller, Michael Z. Williamson, Steve White, Robert Buettner, Susan R. Matthews, Dave Bara, and many more!
Contributors:
David Drake
Michael Z. Williamson
Mark L. Van Name
Steve White
Jody Lynn Nye
Brendan DuBois
Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
Susan R. Matthews
Mike Kupari
J.R. Dunn
Robert Buettner
Christopher Ruocchio
Dave Bara
Joelle Presby
Gray Rinehart
Recent Releases by the Contributors
David Drake
The Republic of Cinnabar
Navy Series and others
Though Hell Should Bar the Way
Steve White
The Jason Thanou Series
and others
Gods of Dawn
Mark L. Van Name
The Jon and Lobo Series
No Going Back
Mike Kupari
Sins of Her Father
Jody Lynn Nye
The Imperium Series and others
Rhythm of the Imperium
J. R. Dunn
The Day After Gettysburg
(with Robert Conroy)
Michael Z. Williamson
Freehold Series and others
Angeleyes
Gray Rinehart
Walking on the Sea of Clouds (Wordfire Press)
Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
The Liaden Universe® Series
Neogenesis
Dave Bara
The Lightship Chronicles
Defiant (DAW Books)
Joelle Presby
The Hell’s Gate Series
The Road to Hell (with David Weber)
Susan R. Matthews
The Under Jurisdiction Series
Blood Enemies
Robert Buettner
The Orphans Legacy Series and others
The Golden Gate
Christopher Ruocchio
The Sun Eater Series
Empire of Silence (DAW Books)
Brendan DuBois
The Dark Victory Series
Red Vengeance
Tony Daniel (co-editor)
Wulf’s Saga
The Amber Arrow
STAR DESTROYERS
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
“Superweapon” ©2018 by David Drake. “A Sudden Stop” ©2018 by Steve White. “Another Solution” ©2018 by Mark L. Van Name. “The Magnolia Incident” ©2018 by Mike Kupari. “A Helping Hand” ©2018 by Jody Lynn Nye. “Boomers” ©2018 by J. R. Dunn. “Hate in the Darkness” ©2018 by Michael Z. Williamson. “The Stars are Silent” ©2018 by Gray Rinehart. “Excerpts from Two Lives” ©2018 by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller. “Icebreaker” ©2018 by Dave Bara. “Try Not to Kill Us All” ©2018 by Joelle Presby. “Skipjack” ©2018 by Susan R. Matthews. “Homecoming” ©2018 by Robert Buettner. “Not Made For Us” ©2018 by Christopher Ruocchio. “A Tale of the Great Trek War Aboard the Starship Persistence” ©2018 by Brendan DuBois.
Introduction and all additional material copyright © 2018 by Tony Daniel and Christopher Ruocchio.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-4814-8309-4
eISBN: 978-1-62579-631-8
Cover art by Kurt Miller
First Baen printing, March 2018
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Electronic Version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
INTRODUCTION
Tony Daniel and Christopher Ruocchio
Big Ships. Blowing Things Up.
The big spaceship. Armed, looming, dangerous.
The leviathan.
There’s an allure to the battleship, the destroyer, and other big ships of war, going back to the earliest days of science fiction. It matches (and is probably derived from) battleship nostalgia in the world’s saltwater navies. The allure goes beyond sheer power and gets at the intricacy of men inhabiting what amounts to a small world—a world dedicated to one purpose.
Blowing things up.
Herman Wouk states it beautifully in his World War II masterpiece, The Winds of War:
“Put together at different times and places of different steel plates and machines, embodied in many forms under many names, a battleship was always one thing: the strongest kind of warship afloat. This meant a thousand ever-changing specifications of size, design, propulsion, armor, armament, interior communication, interior supply systems; a thousand rituals and disciplines binding the crew, from the captain to the youngest striker, into one dependable corporate will and intelligence. In this sense there had been battleships in the days of Phoenicia and Rome, and there would always be battleships—a living peak of human knowledge and craft, a floating engineering structure
dedicated to one aim: the control of the sea.” *
The tradition of reverence for big vessels equipped for war is not limited to battleships, of course. The massive cities that are aircraft carriers qualify, as do those silent traversers of the deep, pregnant with death on a planetary scale, the ballistic-missile submarines. They don’t call them “boomers” for nothing, after all.
It is not only the sheer power of such ships that speaks to the warrior soul, however. These things are also intricate. They are the first cyborgs in a very real sense, for men are a component of the weapon. Battleships are organic. When manned by a trained crew under skilled officers, they are not mere objects. They are beings.
This may be part of the connection big ships have to science fiction. For to travel long distances through space, it often seems a given that a device that is advanced, intricate, and intimately bound up with human survival in a harsh environment will be required. Which, in turn, is practically the definition of a ship. Perhaps humans will one day travel to the stars via quantum gates, space-time folding, redefining our perception of reality by learning alien tongues (or, what amounts to the same thing, by wishing really hard, ala John Carter of Mars), but for those who like their science fiction scientifically sound and plausible given what we know now, it’s difficult to beat a big ship as the most likely transport into the galaxy and beyond.
It isn’t so much that they destroy stars, as that when such a ship speaks with her guns, the stars themselves might be seen to quiver.
So all aboard—for a sea of stars. These are the big ships of the future, the powerful ships that will allow us to face a harsh universe toe-to-toe. And if there are ancient alien intelligences out there who seek our doom, it will be the big ships that marshal the power to stop them, defeat them, and—should they not agree to go quietly into that good night—blow them to Kingdom Come.
But it isn’t just ships. It can’t be.
There are people inside these monsters.
The battleship breeds a certain sort of sailor. Here’s how Wouk describes his hero, US Navy officer Victor Henry, in The Winds of War:
“If he had a home in the world, it was a battleship. . . . It was the only thing to which Victor Henry had ever given himself whole; more than to his family, much more than to the sprawling abstraction called the Navy. He was a battleship man.” *
At the center of every story in this volume is a man, woman, or child whose fate is intimately linked to the star destroyer he or she lives within and, in most cases, serves aboard. A “battleship man” blows things up, but blows them up for a reason.
It may not be a good reason. He or she may be misguided by fate, luck, love, or sheer misinformation.
He or she may have the best reason in the world.
But we guarantee that for every human reason, there’s a story.
Here they are.
—The editors
* Herman Wouk, The Winds of War (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1971), p. 158.
SUPERWEAPON
David Drake
As ships grow in size and complexity, so do their command systems. And as humanity heads into space, it may be that those command systems become smart enough to consider just what they are being asked to do, serving those contentious humans in the first place. It turns out that even if bigger is better for a ship—maybe that’s not always the case for us puny human beings. It’s a wry and grim tale from David Drake, from whom we would expect no less!
The attendant at the conference room door wasn’t a guard: she was unarmed, and she wore the purple dress uniform of a full commander in the Navy. Kearney had thought that the Defense Board might keep the Surveyors waiting to demonstrate its power, but precisely at 1200 hours—Commonwealth City local time—the commander opened the door. “The Defense Board is ready for you now, sirs and madam,” she said.
Rosie Rice snorted, but she got up and with Kearney and Balthus trooped into a room whose two semicircular tables faced one another. The clear walls gave an unobstructed view of the city outside. Five officers in uniform sat at the more distant table; there were three empty chairs at the nearer side.
Kearney took the middle chair. Balthus, the Head of Biology, sat to his left and Rice, Head of Information, took the right seat and set up her little console on the table. She ran the hardware for these briefings. Normally Balthus was the star, describing exotic life forms, but Kearney was pretty sure that the Defense officials this time were going to be primarily interested in what Rice had to say.
There were no ID tags on either the officers or the table in front of them, but Rice had made sure the surveyors had the images, names, and full information about the folks they’d be meeting today. Topelius, a small man in the dark green of the Army, glared at them and said, “Quite a gang of scruffs, aren’t you? Do you think this meeting is a joke?”
“The waste of our time certainly isn’t a joke,” said Rice. She was short-tempered at the best of times, and Kearney guessed he could count on the fingers of one hand how often he remembered her being in a good mood. “As for you lot, though—”
“Rosie!” Kearney said. “Remember, this is work. Do your job.”
The uniforms were already angry. Though Defense didn’t have any formal control over the Survey Section, it’d be naïve to imagine that, in a bureaucracy as large as the Commonwealth’s, Defense couldn’t make life difficult for individual surveyors if it put its mind to it.
Rice scowled, but she shut up. Kearney turned quickly—he was afraid one of the Defense people would try to fill the silence—and said, “But that’s the point, General Topelius: this is work for us, so we’re in our working outfits.”
Rice wore a brown sweater over a checked shirt; Balthus’ lab coat was probably cleaner than it looked—many of the stains, though permanent, had been sterilized—but it certainly wasn’t clean. Kearney himself had put on a new suit of spacers’ slops; they were soft, loose, and comfortable, but he didn’t pretend they were strack.
“Don’t give me that!” snapped Topelius. “I know the Survey Section has uniforms!”
“Central Office does, yes,” said Kearney. “Management. But sir, you specified you didn’t want Central Office personnel, you wanted the chiefs of the team who actually surveyed the artifact. Real surveyors are almost always in protective gear, so our working clothes are what’s comfortable in a hard suit.”
“Less uncomfortable,” Balthus said. “No way a hard suit is comfortable.”
A sky-train was moving across the city in its shimmering tube of ionized atmosphere. It was noticeably lower than the level of the conference room. Kearney wondered just how high in the Defense Tower they were.
A doorman had walked the team on its arrival to a sealed car which shunted them to the elevator. The elevator had brought them up to a waiting room. The attendants who’d put them aboard the vehicles hadn’t provided anything but monosyllabic directions, and the commander had remained as silent as the conference room door behind her.
“What I want to know . . . ,” said Rice in her usual angry tone. “If Central Office can’t talk to you lot and let us get on with our jobs, what bloody use are they?”
Your salary is paid into your account, Kearney thought, and you draw your rations.
He didn’t say that aloud, because Rice really didn’t much care about money or food—and anyway, it wasn’t the point of this meeting. To Admiral Blumenthal he said, “Sir, you want to discuss the artifact. We’re here to do that.”
“What we want to know,” said Bowdoin of Operations, “is why Survey Section has been hiding an alien warship from the Ministry of Defense for months!”
“Well, it’s more like a year and a half, isn’t it?” said Balthus, looking at Kearney with that puzzled expression he got when he was trying to find the precise phrase.
“We didn’t know it was a warship until seven months ago when we identified the weapons system,” Rice objected.
Her control wands twitched. An image of a p
rism orbiting the yellow clouds of a gas giant appeared in the air, just above eye level of the seated parties. The body had four rectangular sides and stubby pyramids on both ends.
“Well, we were pretty sure,” said Balthus. “There wasn’t any room for cargo.”
“Suspecting isn’t knowing!” Rice said. “We’re surveyors, not fortune tellers!”
“What’s important . . . ,” Kearney said, speaking over his teammates and hoping to shush them before the Board blew its collective gasket. “Is that we weren’t hiding anything. We’d been making progress reports through our own chain of command from the beginning. As soon as we were sure that it was a warship, we—the field team—reported that directly to the nearest Ministry of Defense facility.”
“Which was a dockyard,” Blumenthal said. “A bloody regional dockyard!”
“Well, we’d found a ship,” Balthus said. “So we reported it to a dockyard.”
He really was as innocent as he sounded. Kearney knew that he’d never have been able to put that fiction across, but Balthus seemed to have done so. Rice, of course, wouldn’t have bothered trying.